I just finished reading Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, thanks to , who very kindly gave me her copy. It’s wild romp, mostly through the mid- to high-end restaurant kitchens of New York City. Though Bourdain indulges a little too often in riffs on what a crazy, piratical, drug-scarfing band of reprobates he and his kitchen mates are, it’s one of those books that ably reveals the secret world beneath the skin of everyday life. Bourdain does dish some trade secrets (don’t order the fish on Mondays), but what I found really compelling was the way he gets you inside a chef’s head.

I’ve never been a “foodie.” Oh, I like to eat, all too much, but I’ve rarely taken the time to be a sensualist about food. Bordain really gives you a feel for how chefs think about food—what excites them, and what should excite you. Reading it has made me excited to try foods outside my comfort zone, and to really treat a meal as a sensual experience. And by the way, if you’ve ever been intimidated by a snotty waiter, this book will be the antidote.

Oddly, for all the illegal, anti-social, and boorish behavior Bourdain chronicles (and confesses to), one of the themes that runs through the book is taking responsibility for one’s life. He describes some lessons learned from a restaurant owner he only identifies as Bigfoot:

Bigfoot understood–as I came to understand–that character is far more important than skills or employment history. And he recognized character–good and bad–brilliantly. He understood, and taught me, that a guy who shows up every day on time, never calls in sick, and does what he said he was going to do is less likely to fuck you in the end than a guy who has an incredible resume but is less than reliable about arrival time.

Finally, Bourdain can really write. (He’s apparently written a couple of novels.) He’s funny, profane, and a very good judge of horseflesh, literally and figuratively. Bourdain has a fantastic eye for detail—his descriptions of Tokyo are riveting—and he sees deeper into people than many novelists.

If you eat, this book is for you.

Gene Lyons reviews Brokeback Mountain in the Decatur Daily Democrat, in which he says:

The inability to tolerate ambiguity defines the authoritarian mind. To control freaks, there’s no such thing as art, only propaganda. Every story must have a didactic message, the simpler the better. In that regard, self-styled “Christians,” in the politicized sense, are much like Marxist advocates of “Socialist realism.”

Lyons’ review of the film and its critics is very much worth reading on its own merits, but it struck me with particular force because I’ve been musing a lot lately about tolerating ambiguity in life, and how much of becoming an adult—much less a writer—requires the ability to do so.

Freud supposedly wrote “Neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity.” By that standard the world is full of neurotics. I think while the desire for a black-and-white worldview is at odds with the way the world actually works, that desire seems to be part of the human condition. If “wisdom” means anything, I think it means the willingness to continue struggling with our attraction to absolutes.

The very idea that the struggle is worth making is abhorrent to many people. Christian fundamentalists call that struggle “relativism,” with the belief that acknowledging complexity leads to evil. Fundamentalists of all stripes are opposed to this so-called relativism (or “liberalism” or “western ideology”); that’s the defining characteristic of the breed. To cite one example, the bumper-sticker biology of “life begins at conception” is at least in part a way to avoid struggling with the complicated biological and ethical question of what it means to be human, and the biologically inescapable reality that “human” is a difficult point to fix on the continuum from fertilization to old age.

It’s easy, though, to point the finger at fundamentalists and say “Bad!” It’s an example of how seductive the call of absolutism is: we freethinkers are good, and those fundamentalists are bad. has a terrific quote from Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett on The Fabulous Quoteserver: “Most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.” (From the novel Good Omens.)

In my own life I’m often tempted to collapse the wave function: a bad answer, in many ways, is easier to tolerate than no answer at all. When I’m in the throes of temptation to (over)simplify things, I try to ask myself if I’d really prefer a dead cat.

The power was off for about a third of the homes on my block from 6 p.m. yesterday until the wee hours of the morning today. Snow melt had apparently damaged an underground feeder cable, and ConEd had crews working outside my window most of the night. For me it was a minor inconvenience: I curled up in bed and finished reading Steve Jones’ Darwin’s Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated, by the light of a battery-powered LED booklight my niece gave me for Christmas. But the enforced vacation from my computer, the Internet, television and radio did remind me of how critically dependent I am, how most Americans are, on the power grid.

Right now the power in Baghdad is only on from two to six hours a day (which has interesting implications for the love lives of Iraqis, as you can see from the linked article). That means for the relative few who can afford it, electricity comes from generators that are loud, dirty and expensive—both to buy and to operate. For the majority of Baghdad residents the lack of power is an ongoing misery, complicating every facet of day to day life.

For most Americans, I suspect nothing would invert the normal order of things more than sustained power outages. After the first day or so the lack of entertainment would be a trivial concern. There would be no refrigerated food (and for many people, no way to cook it), no heat or hot water. No fire or burglar alarms. New York City’s water supply is mostly gravity fed, but in a sustained blackout its drinking water would be unfiltered, a potential health problem. In many communities there would be no drinking water. Even if telephone companies powered their cellular networks with generators, mobile phones would begin failing within twenty-four hours because their owners would have no way to recharge them. In New York and a few other big cities, the subway systems would be dead, stranding millions of commuters. Vehicle traffic would slow to a crawl from the lack of signals, and without pumps, subway and vehicle tunnels would begin to flood.

These are just the problems that occur to me immediately. I’m sure there are many, many more I could imagine if I weren’t already scaring myself silly. We like to think of the power grid as a robust technology here in the U.S., but the truth is that our normal way of life, and in many cases our lives, are dependent upon resources over which we exert no individual control (and sometimes precious little collective control, as in the case of Enron manipulating the electrical supply in California). It’s rather a humbling realization.